Robert Love, a famous Linux kernel hacker, has written a blog entry with his thoughs on the recently posted Vista's network slowdown issue and the explanation given by Mark Russinovich: "Unlike DPCs, however, the Linux parallel does not consume nearly half of your CPU. There is no excusable reason why processing IP packets should so damagingly affect the system. Thus, this absolutely abysmal networking performance should be an issue in and of itself, but the Windows developers decided to focus on a secondary effect."

hell they could even take a quick peek at the latest FreeBSD networking code to see what optimisations and algorithms they use. A programmer who doesn't take advantage of the tools available to him is a bad programmer.

Microsoft programmers are not allowed to look at any external source code at all, not even BSD licensed code. There are exceptions of course, for instance zlib is available internally, but those exceptions are only granted by Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA) after extensive IP vetting. The problem for Microsoft, as always, is liability and IP taint; they are scared that if they take ideas and/or code from BSD etc someone might claim it's some kind of patent infringement or similar. They deploy this policy world-wide because even though far from all countries recognize the patentability of software, Microsoft still needs to distribute its software globally which include the US market with its insane legal climate.